Why had StableTec made this elevator so slow? Why was it the only way in or out of the stable? Lyra paced back and forth on the platform, impatient to get within reach of Blue Note. Bullets whistled overhead.

This was taking too long; Blue Note might already be dead. She gritted her teeth and teleported for the second time in five minutes. She came out of the teleport three hooves over the ground and grunted in pain as the shock of landing vibrated through her legs. Sunlight gleamed off the snow, blinding her. She raised a shield, her horn screaming in protest at the sudden overuse of magic, and raced towards the red and blue blur on the white.

“Blue! Blue!” she cried, skidding to a stop next to her huddled body. “Oh Harmony, oh Harmony, please be all right.”

“Blue Note can’t move her wing.” Blue Note lay behind the pile of cinder blocks she’d been using for cover, such a mess of gore and tangled clothes that Lyra couldn’t even tell where she was wounded, except that her wing hung at a funny angle, and the membrane was torn.

“Don’t try it!” Lyra looked down the hill to the south. “What happened… Oh, fuck me with a forklift.”

Vindaloo had found an army.

Not a friendly one.

Five Minutemares fled uphill at top speed, clouds of snow flying up from under their hooves. Behind them at least a hundred earth ponies in raider armor followed, hooting and mocking. Who was shooting, then? Somepony was shooting. A bullet flew by so close it tickled the fur on the edge of her ear, and Lyra fell flat on her belly behind the cinder blocks.

Peeking through the holes in the blocks, she saw the shooters — three ponies sitting in a tree like birds: one red, one yellow, one black. Red and Yellow were shooting at the Minutemares; Black’s rifle tracked back and forth in Lyra’s direction. She’d lost sight of her. That gave her second to think.

Lyra picked up Blue Note’s rifle — a Moosein-Neighgant, an old Crystal Empire single-shot rifle, she’d used one often at the firing range — and entered SATS. The program only estimated a ten percent chance to hit; the Moosein only had a five-round magazine. Lyra didn’t like those odds.

That tree they were sitting in looked dead. Dry. Flammable. Could she do pyrokinesis at this range? No. But she could hit the tree with a flaming bullet. She created a cylinder of rotating force fields in front of the Moosein’s muzzle — an ‘Inkwell Accelerator’ — locked onto the tree in SATS and fired. The flaming bullet zipped over the heads of the advancing army’s heads. It sparked as it hit the tree, and soon flames raced along the desiccated branches. The raider snipers dove into the snow, rolling around to extinguish their flaming bodies.

Vindaloo closed the distance, the other Minutemares close behind, two of them carrying Trail Mix, who was bleeding heavily from a wound on her flank.

“What happened?” said Lyra.

“What does it fucking look like?” said Vindaloo, rushing to the control panel and starting the elevator. “Raiders ambushed us at the ration stockpile. Looks like they’re out for revenge.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

BON-80n waited for them at the base of the elevator with two ponies she was training as medics.

“They shot her! She’s dying!” wailed Lyra as BON-80n helped her lay Blue Note on a waiting gurney.

“Blue Note is… augh… not dying,” insisted Blue Note. “But her wing hurts.”

BON-80n’s chassis lights flashed red. “When I find the pony who let a pregnant mare go on guard duty I will give them many harsh words.”

“Blue Note has no regrets.”

“Will she be all right?” said Lyra. “Can’t you just use a stimpack on her?”

“Not with this wing,” said BON-80n. “It will heal incorrectly and she will never fly again.” Her tentacles probed delicately at the wounded muscle and torn membrane. A worrying shard of white poked out through tangled red flesh. “I will need to operate immediately if I am to save it.”

Lyra’s insides felt cold. “You’re not a surgery bot.”

BON-80n’s chassis lights flickered blue.”I am only programmed to assist with surgery, but I am all we have. It will have to do my best. Please. Go see if the Majors need your help.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Crispy’s monitors showed grainy black and white feeds of dozens of ponies milling around outside the stable exit. Denied a fight, they rioted, smashing everything they could find. Unfortunately for them, what they could find wasn’t much. They knocked over the trailer, smashed that half desk, lit some trees on fire. Lyra started to worry about her car, then decided not too — raiders couldn’t do much that twenty years and a megaspell war couldn’t.

They hadn’t found any of the cameras, though there was one in the exterior door control station. That station held a lot of interest for them. Lyra winced when they started wailing on its base with a sledgehammer “Crispy don’t let them do that! I don’t know if I can fix it.”

Crispy flicked on the external PA. “Can I help you fillies with anything?”

A pony with a mane that went all the way around his neck like a lion’s strutted over to the edge of the vault. “I’m Haaaayyymaker!” he said, shaking his mane. “Want your stable. Want you dead. Pretty simple. How do you open this thing up?”

“You’re telling my none of you brought a can opener?” said Crispy, leaning back in his chair with a hoof on the PA button.

“Haha, you think you’re funny,” said Haymaker. “You think you’re cute. You’re not. You killed the Vulture Pie gang. That’s fine. Lazy fucks. You killed the Fat Bastards. That’s great, everypony hated those greedy whores. You killed Skull Splitter and Scattershot.”

“I don’t even know who they are,” said Crispy.

“Oh, he must mean Skull and Bullseye. That was me,” said Lyra. “I killed them.”

“You did what?” said Vindaloo from behind them.

“Well fuck you,” said Haymaker. “They were good contractors. But that’s not why I’m here. Got to make an example of you fools. You stood up to raiders. What if other ponies find out you’ve been standing up to raiders? They might try it themselves. They might organize. We’d actually have to start trying, instead of sitting around doing drugs all day. Huge pain in the dick. Let us in now, and we’ll only torture you a little bit.”

“I have a counter-proposal,” said Crispy. “How about you suck my cock instead?”

“Don’t make me come in there,” growled Haymaker.

Crispy took his hoof off the outside PA button. “I guess we should have seen this coming.”

Vindaloo tapped Lyra on the shoulder. “You were bluffing about killing Bullseye and Skull Splitter, right?”

Lyra blinked. “No. I really did that. That was one of the first things I did after I woke up. Was that bad?”

“Bullshit.” Vindaloo narrowed her eyes. “You’re telling me you capped two of the hardest motherfuckers in the wasteland singlehoofed?”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “Singlehoofed and unarmed. I knocked Scattershot down the elevator shaft with my magic and pukwudgies ate her. Crispy, you saw what was left of her when we came down here.”

Crispy whistled and nodded. “Not recognizable, but sure, I’ll buy that.”

“And Skull Splitter?” said Vindaloo.

“Decapitated him with a telekinetically accelerated writing desk. He’s still up there under a couple of feet of snow, as far as I know. I will show you in the springtime. It will be wonderful.”

Vindaloo squinted at Lyra. Hot air puffed from her flaring nostrils. She leaned forward and sniffed at Lyra. Lyra leaned back. “Do you think I’m lying to you?” said Lyra.

“No,” said Vindaloo, not backing off, “But I’m going back to my theory where you’re not who you say you are. What do you think, Crispy? Ministry of Awesome black ops?”

Crispy tapped on one of his monitors. “Look what they’re doing.” Raider ponies stood in a circle around the stable entrance, trying to hammer wedges into the edge of the stable door with sledgehammers and mallets. They weren’t having a lot of success — one accidentally launched her wedge across the door into another raider pony’s face. Another missed his swing and sledgehammered the head of the pony holding his wedge in place for him.

Lyra winced. “How long do you think it’s going to take to get in there, working like that?”

“Twenty, maybe forty years. But I don’t think we have the supplies for that kind of siege. Vindaloo?”

Vindaloo shook her head. “We have three weeks food, with strict rationing. Our water supply will last three days.”

“Three days!” said Crispy. “What about the water we brought back from the ration stockpile?”

“We showered in it.”

Crispy blew out through his lips and kicked out his hind legs, sending his rolly chair skittering across the security office. “Well, that was short-sighted of us. So what do we do? We can’t attack them, there are too many.”

“That would be suicide,” agreed Vindaloo.

Lyra stroked her hoof with one chin. “So we can’t go out to fight them, and we can’t hide in the stable.”

“That’s exactly what we just got finished saying,” said Vindaloo, eyes rolling so hard it looked like they might turn around backward in her skull.

Lyra ignored her. She felt sure she was onto something. “So what if we let them into the stable?”

Vindaloo’s eyes flashed. She gritted her teeth, stiffened her legs, and stomped with both her forelegs.

Lyra sighed. “Do you have something to say, Major?”

But Vindaloo didn’t respond right away. Gears turned behind her eyes. She tilted her head first to one side, then another. “There’s a level of stupidity so profound it becomes genius.”

Crispy scooted his chair towards them on its rollers. “Go on, Lyra. What did you have in mind?”

Lyra took a deep breath. “Okay, this is very dangerous, but this is what I was thinking…”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭
Burrburrary 9th, EoH 47

Steam hissed from the stable door’s elevator hydraulics as Lyra twisted open a valve. The muffled sound of raiders pounding on the vault door chimed down the thirty tail elevator shaft above them.

“If we’re under it when it falls, won’t it squash us?” said Paneer, her eyes dancing with enthusiasm. She wore a different foal-sized stable suit, this one cut into a little jacket with yellow, orange and green ribbons laced clumsily through the fabric of the cuffs.

“Yes. The idea is not to be under it when it falls. Wrench please?”

“Is it okay to break the door on purpose? I didn’t think it was okay to break things.” Paneer floated the bolt wrench out of the tool bag and wobbled it over to Lyra.

“What does your mom do for a living? The thing about rules is that a lot of them are situational. Sometimes you need to break a rule, and knowing when to do that is what makes you a grown-up. But the trick in this case,” she said, wrenching open a stubborn flow control value, “is to break the door in such a way that we can fix it again after the battle.”

“Break it, fix it. Got it.”

“So the elevator here is a hydraulic lift. This pump pushes oil into the big telescoping piston in the middle here, which elevates the stable door. Then those big bolts up there come out to lock the door in place.” Lyra pointed the components out one by one. Paneer’s eyes followed her hoof, rapt. “So what I’m doing right now is draining most of the oil from the piston so that it’s only held up by the bolts. Not all of it, though — I’m leaving a cushion of oil in there so that the piston won’t be damaged when the stable door falls.” Lyra gave the wrench a final twist, and the piston hissed and shifted. “Okay. It’s draining. Do you see the pressure gauge right there?”

“Yep!”

“Tell me when it gets to three of these little tic marks before the red.”

“It’s going down fast!”

Lyra smiled. She could see the gauge just fine in her side vision, but she wanted Paneer to be involved. “Don’t worry. Just pay attention. You’ve got this.”

“Falling. Falling… Now!”

Lyra turned the wrench clockwise. The valve closed, and the piston groaned. Above them, the stable door slumped against its restraints. The pounding paused, then quickened.

“Did I do okay?” said Paneer. “It’s right on the red.”

“Perfect. That’s what I was aiming for,” said Lyra. “I had you lead the target a little.”

“Right. Mom does that with her rifle.”

”Now comes the dangerous part. I need to ungually disengage those bolts with my magic. I need to be able to see them, so I’ll have to stay in the shaft. And I need you to be ready to pull me out if the door falls before I’m ready.”

Paneer’s mouth fell open. “I can’t do that! I’m not strong enough!”

“You don’t need to be strong. I’m going to make a magical tether between us. All you’ll need to do is tug. Do you mind if we touch horns for a second?”

Paneer nodded. “S-sure.”

Lyra linked her magic field with Paneer’s. She felt an odd, ghostly sensation of double-presence as though a ghost version of herself stood where Paneer was.

“Whoa. Mystical bullshit,” said Paneer, eyes wide.

“Exactly. Give the tether a tug so I know you’ve… Yipe!” A telekinetic pressure on Lyra's horn jerked her a full hoof towards her young apprentice. “Okay, I think you’ve got it. Now go stand over there.”

Paneer craned her neck to see where Lyra was pointing. “All the way over there? That’s like halfway across the foyer! How come I don’t get to do any of the dangerous stuff?” She stomped a hoof petulantly.

“I don’t you to get hurt by any flying debris. Your mother will kill me if I let anything happen to you. This way at least one of us lives.”

Paneer stomped off sullenly into the foyer. Lyra looked up and began pulling back bolts. Each one of the six was a multi-stage process. When she had done exactly half, the stable door creaked and slumped down six inches on one side. Lyra flinched. Paneer tugged on the tether, but Lyra waved her off. Muffled cheering from above. Lyra stepped back to the edge of the hydraulics pit and started work on the fourth bolt.

Her lower back twinged. “Yeah, no shit,” she said. But her earth pony disaster sense was more on point than she realized — the stable door shook, as though a massive weight had landed on it suddenly. Then again, as if that weight had jumped. The remaining bolts let out a ghoulish metallic shriek and gave way. The stable door rushed towards Lyra. She tried to run, but her muscles froze in shock. She felt a tug on her horn, and the foyer blurred past her. When she came to a stop she was six hooves past Paneer and her butt was hot from friction with the floor.

“Good job, Paneer! I…” Her praise died in her mouth.

There, standing on the broken stable door, was a testament to the Minutemare’s failure to clean up after themselves — Fizzlepop’s purple and black power armor, with the Fat Bastards’ fifty caliber machine gun strapped to its battle saddle.

Raiders were slightly smarter than advertised.

“You fucking fixed it?” screamed Lyra, throwing up a double shield in front of her and Paneer. “How?”

The power armor pony opened fire. Massive bullets slammed into Lyra’s shield, pushing her back with kinetic transfer and making her horn hurt so much it felt like it might shatter. Raider ponies rappelled down the shaft on either side of the power armor pony.

Lyra and Paneer ran, screaming. It was part of the plan that they flee in an apparent panic once the stable door was open. Lyra had been worried about her acting ability. She needn’t have been.

They fled down the maintenance corridor, Lyra’s shield already beginning to crack. Smaller impacts stuttered alongside the big ones as more raiders added their weapons to the curtain of bullets.

Paneer reached the side corridor where they were supposed to disappear a few paces ahead of Lyra. She turned to say something the moment Lyra’s shield shattered. The words never got out of her mouth — a bullet plucked her up into the air and sent her hurtling down the corridor. Lyra cast the teleport spell she’d prepared. Golden light filled her vision.

They came out of the tesseract in an office full of armed Minutemares. She laid Paneer on the floor and applied pressure to her wound with a towel.

“Shit, shit, shit,” said Rotgut. “Vindaloo’s gonna murder us!”

“Stimpack! Quick!” snapped Lyra. The bullet had torn through Paneer’s left haunch. Blood soaked through the white towel, quickly turning it red. “Before she bleeds out!”

Rotgut fumbled in his saddlebags for the team’s one stimpack. Lyra tore it from his mouth and jammed the needle into Paneer’s flank. Paneer shrieked and thrashed, but Lyra held the stimpack steady and pushed down the plunger.

Paneer’s bleeding stopped, and the wound’s edges curled closed. Not completely — it would certainly leave a scar. But Paneer would live. The foal pushed herself off the floor and huddled against Lyra’s chest, sobbing quietly. Lyra wrapped her forelegs around her. “What’s going on in the atrium? Have the raiders reached it yet?”

This office was behind three locked doors and accessible only through the stable’s living quarters. It had been chosen as Lyra and Rotgut’s staging area for its inaccessibility and it’s working terminal. The Minutemare’s aversion to constant surveillance had been set aside for this operation. Rotgut turned the monitor to face Lyra. Things didn’t look good in the atrium — dozens of raiders, maybe Haymaker’s whole army, had rushed into it, just as they’d hoped. But the power armor was causing problems. It’s machinegun forced ponies into cover wherever it turned, and from the bullet impacts sparkling off its armored hide Lyra could see it was drawing the fire of inexperienced ponies. There were no noncombatants in the stable today — everypony except BON-80n’s medic had been given basic firearms training and a weapon. Lyra and Rotgut had the preponderance of ponies with combat experience.

“What are we going to do?” said Rotgut. “We can’t fight that thing.

“Close the trap,” said Lyra. “We’ve gotten this far in the plan. If we don’t close the trap, it’s all for nothing.”

“But how? Our guns are gonna do fuck all against that armor!”

“Hold Paneer for a second. I want to look at something.” She tapped at the terminal’s keyboard and zoomed the camera in on the power armor. “There. They didn’t replace the panel on the emergency manual release.”

Rotgut stared at her blankly as Paneer’s tears soaked his chest ruff.

Lyra rolled her eyes so hard it made her hornache worse. “I need you to get me into line of sight with that power armor, and I can pop it like an oyster. Got it?”

Light dawned behind Rotgut’s eyes. “Manual release! Oh, shit, yeah, I remember that!”

Lyra turned to Paneer. “Can you be okay here? We need every gun.”

“Can I watch the camera feeds?” said Paneer, rubbing at her wet cheeks with the pastern of her good hoof.

“Can I stop you?” said Lyra.

Paneer grabbed her by one leg and hugged her hard. “Please don’t die.” Lyra leaned down to nuzzle her mane. “I’ll do my best.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Haymaker’s raiders hadn’t left a rear guard. Why would they have? They thought they had won.

It took Lyra three round trip teleports to get all of her team into the maintenance corridor, and by the time she was done her horn felt like it was going to split in half. She and Rotgut sent two Minutemares to guard the foyer end of the corridor against raider stragglers and led the rest deeper into the stable.

The atrium rang with the sound of gunfire and echoed with the sound of screams. Twenty raiders clustered along the balcony in front of them, taking cover behind barrels and crates, all facing away from them into the atrium. Lyra and Rotgut’s team shot them all before they even had time to turn around. Lyra helped, firing her pistol from her mouth because her horn hurt too much to levitate it.

Lyra’s team took the raiders' places, kicking aside their corpses to make room. Rotgut signaled to Crispy and Vindaloo’s team that they were in position, then ducked down as bullets whistled past his head.

Lyra’s radio crackled. “Lyra! Do something about that power armor!” Apparently, in Vindaloo’s mind ‘radio silence’ was for other ponies.

“I’m working on it!” It was hard to get a clear line of sight to the power armor pony with so much lead in the air. Lyra got down on her belly, and poked one eye out behind the crate she hid behind.

Most of the raiders were in the middle of the lower floor of the atrium. They’d charged down the stairs and gotten themselves surrounded, and from the way they whooped and hollered, it didn’t even seem like they knew how much danger they were in. The power armor pony stood facing away from her, the emergency release handle visible. She reached out with her telekinesis; just drawing her magic together felt like walking on a broken ankle. This was it. This was burnout. She’d known about magic burnout, and she’d pushed anyway, and here she was. She needed to just stop. Stop using magic so she wouldn’t hurt herself anymore. But she had to do this first. She grabbed the handle and pulled. The inside of her horn filled itself with razor blades.

The purple power armor opened with the grace of a blooming flower. The bat pony inside stood blinking in confusion for a second and a half before bullets from four different directions tore his body to bloody scraps.

Lyra rolled back behind her crate, covering her eyes with her hooves. Static filled her vision. She couldn’t hear anything. Littlepip’s scent filled her nose. Oil. Leather. Sweat. Lyra found the smell beautiful, and the fact that she liked it made her feel ill.

“Don’t look,” said Littlepip, her hard, pretty little face so close to Lyra’s that she could feel her breath. “Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look. Please don’t look.”

Lyra pushed her away, and she dissipated like smoke. The razors in her horn had spread out into her head as well, scraping the inside of her skull like a crown of thorns. But she could see and hear again. The gunfire had stopped, and her ears rang with the relative silence. The only sound was Crispy shouting and Haymaker begging. She rolled over again to look out around the crate.

Raider corpses lay in heaps on the atrium floor. Literal heaps! The bodies formed a cone shape towards the stairs up to the balcony and the maintenance corridor. The piles of corpses thickened as the cone narrowed — the raiders had run, been cut down, and the ones behind them had tripped over their bodies and been cut down in turn. Lyra’s throat tightened. She wanted to cry. She’d helped this happen, been instrumental in all this death. But she couldn’t do it. She was dry. Cold. It wasn’t just that she didn’t care — deep down inside, a part of her (Littlepip?) thought this was right.

But the ponies hadn’t killed all the raiders. Fifty-six of them lay on their bellies in two rows of twenty-eight. Stable ponies and Minutmares stood around them in a ragged circle, guns trained on them. Crispy and Haymaker stood at the end of the two lines, Haymaker on his knees with Crispy’s shotgun muzzle pressed against his head.

“We’re sorry. We’re sorry,” said Haymaker, his lean shaggy body shaking with fear. Blood soaked his voluminous mane all along one side, and he held his tail between his hind legs like a whipped dog. “We made a mistake. Just let us go, okay? Let us walk away, and we’ll never bother you again. We’ll tell everypony we know just… just leave those Minutemares alone.” He gave a nervous, placating laugh. “It’s not worth it. It’s not… please…”

Crispy rammed his shotgun’s muzzle against Haymaker’s snout. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” roared Crispy.

“I… I… I don’t know?” stammered Haymaker, going cross-eyed looking at the barrel.

“Do you think you can come into my home? Hurt my foal? Kill my ponies? And just walk away?”

Haymaker scooted back and raised a forehoof placatingly. “Hey. Hey. If it’s tribute you want, we can talk about that. Just… don’t… don’t…”

“You won’t be walking anywhere.” Crispy swept Haymaker’s foreleg out from under him, knocking him to the ground. He swung his shotgun towards his hind legs and fired, blasting one back knee to pulp. “You’ve got to learn that if you fuck with the Minutemares, there are consequences. I’ve got to set a fucking example.”

He left Haymaker yowling and bleeding, and began to walk along the line of prisoners. “One… Two… Three.. Four… Five… Six… Seven… Eight… Nine…” He stopped at the tenth and fired into her head. Then he began counting again.

Lyra couldn’t move. She had to do something, had to say something, had to stop this, but what could she do? The Minutemares were the good ones, weren’t they? They were the good ponies. She’d run. Leave the stable right now.

“Eight… Nine…”

“Please, no! I’ll be good,” begged the twentieth pony, little more than a colt. “I didn’t want to be a raider, I…”

Crispy fired.

Why couldn’t she move?

Crispy counted out three more times, punctuating with shotgun blasts, then kept counting. “One… Two… Three… Four… Five… Six…” He pressed his shotgun against the last stallion’s head. The stallion started to cry. Crispy held his shotgun there for a full minute, eyes narrowed as if deciding whether to round up or not. At last, he stepped back.

“All right, that’s enough. Now go,” he said. “Get lost. And tell everypony you meet what happened here.”

The raiders didn’t move.

Crispy fired into the floor three times. “Run! Run, or I’ll kill you all!

Fifty-one ponies thundered up the stairs beside Lyra, climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades to escape.

Lyra’s whole body felt numb. She couldn’t stop shaking.

No Level Up

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